Specificity and flexibility in early word recognition

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The ability to recognize spoken words plays a crucial role in human interactions. Yet, word recognition is an extraordinarily complicated process: the same word can sound very different across contexts and speakers. For example, the vowel in the word "dog" is quite different when produced by a speaker from Toronto and a speaker from New York City. Little work has addressed the extent to which young word learners can adapt to variability in pronunciations across contexts and speakers, but it is an important issue. If a child from Toronto hears the NYC pronunciation of "dog", should she interpret it as a mispronounced version of the familiar word "dog", or as a new word? Because young word learners have a well-documented bias to assume that each new word signals a new meaning, a failure to identify the same word in different contexts has the potential to slow vocabulary acquisition. The proposed research explores the factors that influence whether and when toddlers are able to adapt to new pronunciations of words, including particulars of the pronunciation itself (how it differs from the typical pronunciation) and the types of real-world knowledge (e.g., visual context, knowledge about the speaker) toddlers can use to interpret unusual pronunciations. For example, hearing an unusual pronunciation of the word "dog" when there is an unfamiliar object in the scene may make toddlers more likely to consider it a new word than when all of the objects have known labels. This work also examines the level of abstraction at which learning about a new accent occurs. Is learning specific to particular words spoken by particular individuals, or does it occur at a more abstract level, generalizing to other words in the lexicon, or to other speakers? This research will help us understand whether or not children recognize words in the same way as adults. Further, understanding the abilities that underlie successful word recognition may lead to earlier diagnosis and treatment of children struggling with comprehension difficulties.